My Epistemic Status as of the end of 2015

The following is a list of things I learned or became more convinced of in 2015:

* The Christian god is real, and so are all the others, just not outside anyone’s head. Almost everyone I’ve ever come across, theist or atheist, misinterprets the implications of this.

Religions furnish both a ritual apparatus and introspective scaffolding, and you need this because cultivating a human soulscape is difficult because human introspection is very shallow.

Some operations are best performed via the mythopoetic command line interface, and religions have a monopoly on this.

* Mantras, meditation, and visualizations work because they create depressions in your cognitive manifold towards which the liquids of attention, energy, and motivation flow. The fact that these things are enthusiastically embraced by mushy flower-power hippies doesn’t mean they don’t work.

* I have a suspicion that attention is more poorly understood and more important than most of us realize. I think it might be the mechanism undergirding Sapir-Whorf effects, and I have noticed that ubermenschen like Richard Feynman, Elon Musk, and Josh Waitzkin are capable of a level of focus I can’t seem to reach.

We need a Dictionary of Internal Events in order to better categorize our failings of attention and target our interventions. We need a more concerted effort to understand the algorithms and circuitry undergirding attention so that we can develop ways of training it.

* Huge amounts of race-level differences in performance are attributable to race-level differences in genes. Conversely, almost none of the gender wage gap is attributable to structural discrimination.

* The division of labor should be applied to power. It kind of already is but nobody is honest about it. I’d rather live in a sovereign startup with a national CEO than a tepid democracy where every problem is addressed via an interminable carnival of special committees and hearings.

* Having learned more about the rise and fall of communism, I like the ideology even less.

* Proposed definition of ‘civilization’ : “a concatenation of black boxes”. Proposed definition of “culture”: “a constellation of Schelling points hanging in the space between two or more minds”.

* There is a such thing as social technology, and tradition is an example of it. The ‘black boxes’ I mentioned in the previous point can include technologies of this sort. The argument known as “Chesterton’s Fence” has teeth, at least if you don’t like Manticores.

* It is inappropriate to categorize systems on the basis of their being “fragile” or “robust”. Rather, think of them as exhibiting what I call ‘vector-dependent fragility’.

A rocket is designed to withstand many g’s of force and enormous temperatures upon reentry into the atmosphere, but if an o-ring is out of place the whole thing might explode.

If words in a language are mispronounced in one way it’s a regional dialect, if they’re mispronounced another way they are incomprehensible.

* The causal structure of a system can be more or less opaque. In cases where causality is well-understood you can be more daring. In cases where it’s not, you should be more cautious.

Or, maybe we shouldn’t be broadcasting messages into space for aliens to pick up because we have no clue what’s out there.

* Rather than thinking about emotions in gestalt, model them as hyperdimensional shapes with bulges, edges, corners, and wrinkles along different axes.

A dear friend of mine and I once spent the better part of an hour taking ‘ambition’ and breaking it down in terms of its ‘direction’, ‘magnitude’, and ‘volatility’. By conversation’s end we had both done this analysis on ourselves and thought about ways we could try and bring our efforts at being productive more in line with the natural shape of our ambition.

The connection to the idea for a Dictionary of Internal Events is probably obvious.